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'.,.. or U g a e. . , (!.ii:.. ... . . . : __::. ' ' . ' , ". . We have a wonderjiil selection of personal y inspeaed Country Homes. Villas and Apartments. Rentals availahle from a week tu u yeur. Call Vacances Provençales Vacations, 1-800-263-7152, FAX (416)322-0706. wwu'.inloramp.net/-vpv / JAMAICA fOotþ P7 ØJea.dt CALL YOUR TRAVEL AGENT OR 1-800-237-3237 jV Þ TJ2 Y . _ t LETTER FROM LONDON THE MARIA PROBLEM Going wild for "The Sound of Music "-with subtitles BY ANTHONY LANE I: T'S start at the very beginning. (I t's a very good place to start.) Maria Augusta Kutschera was born in 1905. As a young woman, she became a postulant at the Nonnberg Abbey, in Salzburg, Austria, but suf- fered from ill health. It was deemed beneficial that she should venture out- side and adopt the post of governess in the home of a naval captain. She married him in 1927, which put an end to any postulating. The captain al- ready had seven children; Maria bore him three more and formed a family musical group, whose success was cut short when Hitler invaded his na- tive land. Even now, no historian has been able to ascertain if this was a gen- uine bid for power or the only possi- ble means whereby the Führer could eradicate the threat of close-harmony sIngIng. Maria and her family fled to Italy, England, and, finally, the United States. The captain died in 1947; two years later, Maria published "The Story of the Trapp Family Singers." In 1956, the book was turned into a hit Ger- man movie; theatrical producers be- gan to sniff around, and in Novem- ber, 1959, "The Sound of Music," with original songs by Rodgers and Hammerstein, opened on Broadway. Twentieth Century Fox soon acquired the movie rights, but the film proved hard to bring to birth. Mter nearly five years of wrangles and pangs, "The Sound of Music," directed by Robert Wise and starring Julie Andrews, had its New York première, on March 2, 1965. To date, the picture has earned a hundred and sixty million dollars. It remains the most popular musi- cal film in history. One woman in Wales has seen it almost a thousand times. In Hong Kong, it is entitled "Fairy Music Blow Fragrant Place, Place Hear." All of which is how I came to be standing on a sidewalk on a dark De- cember evening, waving a foam nun. T HE Prince Charles Cinema sits in central London, a hundred yards east of Piccadilly, between the Notre Dame dance hall and a row of Chinese restaurants. When it opened, in 1991, the idea was that you could catch new and recent pictures for less than two dollars-a fraction of what they cost around the corner, in the plush movie theatres of Leicester Square. Even now, the Prince Charles has nobly resisted the urge to smarten up; the furnish- ings are a touching tribute to wartime brown, and the stalls, flouting a rule of theatrical design which has obtained since the fifth century B.C., appear to slope downward toward the back, so that customers in the rear seats can enjoy an uncluttered view of their own knees. The cinema shows three or four :films a day; come the weekend, everything explodes. Since August, every Friday evening and Sunday afternoon the pro- gram has been the same: "Singalong- a-Sound-of- Music." The idea is simple. You watch the film-uncut, as nature intended, in a scuzzy print, with alarming color shifts as the reels change. The only difference is the added subtitles, which come alive, like the hills, during every song. These enable viewers to join in, which they do with undisguised lustiness. The titling of "The Sound of Music" was prepared by Martin Wagner, for London's Na- tional Film Theatre, and it struck me as the one work of unquestionable genius that I encountered last year. I tend to be embarrassed by subtitles; their auda- cious efforts to snatch at foreign vernac- ulars end up stressing, rather than allay- ing, the alien qualities of the setting. With "The Sound of Music," however, they bring home just how tightly, even soothingly, we are wrapped in this unig- norable :film. In a sense, Wagner had a